


bury my heart underneath these trees

by kirani



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:07:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27784204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirani/pseuds/kirani
Summary: Noah's life existed on the edges of magic until one day he became magic. The story of Noah's death and finding friends despite it.
Relationships: Noah Czerny & Barrington Whelk, Noah Czerny & Noah Czerny's Mother, Noah Czerny & Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent
Comments: 16
Kudos: 12
Collections: Cznernsgiving 2020





	1. Birthday Schnapps

**Author's Note:**

> Mature rating for canon violence and murder.   
> This was written for Cznernsgiving 2020, following the first prompts of each day for the chapters.  
> 1\. Birthday schnapps  
> 2\. Red Mustang  
> 3\. Glitter  
> 4\. Planting flowers  
> 5\. Out the window  
> 6\. Nino's at Night  
> 7\. Cabeswater stars  
> Fic title is from Delta Rae’s “I Will Never Die”

“Happy birthday, fucker!” Whelk shouted, tackling Noah from behind. 

Noah laughed and pushed him off. “Did you get it?”

“I got it,” Whelk nodded, smug. He pulled a paper bag from his inside coat pocket with the top of a bottle poking out the top. “The good shit.”

Noah grabbed for it. 

“Not here!” Whelk shoved the bottle back in his jacket and jerked his head for Noah to follow. Noah rolled his eyes but followed. 

Once they had climbed onto the dormitory roof, Whelk pulled the bottle out again and cracked the seal before offering it to Noah. “How’s it feel to be seventeen?”

Noah shrugged. “Feels the same as sixteen. But there’s schnapps!" He took the bottle and took a long swig from it. 

“Damn, Czerny, save some for the rest of us,” Whelk teased. 

“Who said I was sharing? It’s my birthday gift!” 

Whelk just laughed and snagged the bottle back, taking a pull of his own. 

They passed it back and forth for a while, commenting idly on classes and classmates until a silence fell. 

Whelk broke it. “Do you think we’ll ever find it?”

Noah didn’t need to ask what he was talking about. The ley lines. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

“I have to find it.”

“I know, Barry.”

“I have to!”

“We’ll find it,” Noah said, putting a calming hand on his friend’s knee. They were both well on their way to drunk now and he didn’t want him falling off the roof. 

“You know, I think they’re asleep.”

“Who are?” Noah asked. 

“The ley lines. I think they’re asleep. Like,” Whelk took another swig of the schnapps and passed it back to Noah, “they used to be active and went through here, just like the books say. But something happened and now they’re asleep. Dormant, you know?”

Noah hummed, taking a swig as well. “That could be. Like there wasn’t enough energy anymore? So they went to sleep.”

“Exactly! We just have to wake them up. Let them know we’re here and shit.”

“How though?” 

“No fucking clue, man.”

Noah laughed, even though it wasn’t funny, and passed him the bottle again. 


	2. Red Mustang

They had a plan. Well, Whelk had a plan. He’d found a ritual of some kind and had gathered everything he needed. 

He’d shown up to where Noah was messing around on his skateboard on the quad and announced they were going for a drive.

“Should I change?” Noah asked. Whelk was wearing a black hoodie and jeans but Noah hadn’t bothered to change out of his uniform yet.

“No, you’re fine. You have your keys?” Whelk seemed distracted as Noah patted his pockets and located his keys. 

“Yeah. You good?”

Whelk just nodded and spun around and began walking quickly towards the student parking lot and Noah’s red Mustang. 

Noah kicked up his skateboard and tucked it under his arm before following after his friend. Once they were in the car, Whelk turned to him.

“I found a ritual to awaken the leylines.”

Noah felt his eyes go wide. “How’s it work?” 

“There’s a bunch of stuff, I’ve got it all in here.” He patted his messenger bag. “It needs two people though, I’ll explain when we get there.”

“Wait, there? You know where they are?” Noah blinked, trying to follow his friend’s quick explanations. 

“I was right before, they were just asleep. But we had the right place.”

“Okay, back to the hills we go,” Noah nodded, putting the car into gear. 

They drove in silence, Whelk bouncing his knee nervously on the seat next to him. Noah knew how important this was to his friend, though he’d never quite understood the fervor, but Whelk needed to do it. Needed to prove he could. Needed to  _ fix  _ things.

Noah could understand that.

As they found the old dirt road they’d taken off the highway, Whelk started to mumble under his breath. They passed the ruins of the church off the road and Noah drove until he couldn’t anymore for the trees.

“Barry?” Noah stopped the car.

Whelk looked over at him sharply.

“It’s going to work,” Noah promised, even though he didn’t know what was going to happen. Whelk was his best friend, for all that he was a bit of a bastard. Noah was, too, so it worked out. He wanted to help however he could.

Finally, Noah put the car in park and turned the ignition off. 

“You ready?” he asked Whelk.

“I’m ready,” he answered, though his voice shook with it. He looked so young in that moment. 

Noah just nodded and opened the door. 

“You sit here,” Whelk directed after consulting some papers which seemed to have crudely drawn maps on them. 

Noah sat where he was directed and Whelk started pulling items from his bag. Candles, a small tree branch, a book, and more handwritten pages. 

“Shit, forgot something,” he mumbled, running back to the car. Noah leaned over and started reading the pages of scrawled notes, not even looking up when Whelk returned from the car. 

The next moment everything was pain as his cheek shattered.


	3. Glitter

Light flashed in Noah’s vision like sun spots or glitter as he fell to the ground. He blinked as his remaining eye struggled to focus past the wound that now seemed to make up most of his face. 

“Barry?” he croaked. 

Whelk raised the item in his hands — it was Noah’s skateboard — and hit him again.

This time when the glitter exploded around his vision his eye fell closed and refused to open. He was dying, he was sure of it. 

Vaguely, he heard Whelk begin reciting something. It didn’t sound like English, Latin maybe? Maybe Noah’s dying brain just couldn’t comprehend the words anymore. 

His body was giving up though his mind was still racing. Whelk had stopped reciting now, or maybe Noah’s hearing had just stopped. 

He felt like he was falling, somehow. He tried to open his eyes and his vision was blinded by sparkling light again as he realized he was no longer in his body but instead rocketing down a pathway made of light itself. 

It felt safe. It felt like coming home. 

He was moving and not moving at the same time, being transported along this road. 

_ It must be the ley line. Whelk did it, he woke it up. _ Noah thought to himself.  _ Well, he did it by murdering me so that’s not ideal. _

Then the feeling around him shifted as he flew upwards. Bees, no, hornets swarmed a small body. A boy, no more than nine years old, lay in the grass. Noah was nowhere near Henrietta.

And this boy was dying.

Below him, he felt the power of the ley line surging up behind him, and Noah instinctively grabbed ahold of it and pushed it into the small body before him. He writhed with it as the hornets fled from the power and Noah spoke, even though he didn’t know if the boy could hear him. 

“You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.”

The boy’s body still pulsed with light, glittering in the late afternoon sun as the hundreds of stings swelled ominously, but Noah kept ahold of the ley line energy until the boy opened his eyes. 

With tears in his incorporeal eyes, Noah smiled. It worked. He couldn’t save himself but he could save this boy and that was something. 

Releasing the energy, he fell back into the ley line and let it transport him where it wanted him to go. 


	4. Planting Flowers

Whatever Noah had expected of the afterlife now felt impossible in the vast loneliness of his new-found ghost form. He let the ley line drag him back to his body to find Whelk covering it with debris and then driving off in the Mustang.

He had followed him as far as he was able but got tired and fell back into the ley line. He would probably stash it somewhere so no one knew what had happened.

For a few weeks, whenever he had enough energy, he hung around Aglionby and the place Whelk had left him, expecting someone to find him, but no one ever did. His face and car were plastered all over town and campus but no leads ever materialized. 

Once he tried to pull the energy of the ley line again to give them a sign, but he couldn’t control it anymore. Maybe he’d used it all up.

Most of all, though, he watched Whelk. 

In public, Whelk was the picture of worry and, as time went on, mourning. He seemed to have proven he hadn’t left campus with Noah and had escaped any sort of suspicion. Everyone just felt sorry for him since he and Noah had been friends.

But in private, he was a raging mess. He had piles of books, pages of notes, and a strange gadget that Noah had never seen and which Whelk seemed to mostly yell at. The main issue seemed to be that even though the ley line was awake again, he couldn’t actually use it. 

Noah couldn’t either, other than to exist since it seemed to be the same energy, so he felt his pain. 

He had tried to haunt Whelk for a while, attempting to harness the ley line energy to move things around or speak to him while he slept. But none of it seemed to pass into Whelk’s world.

That didn’t mean yelling at Whelk until his energy faded didn’t feel good, though. 

Eventually, he tired of trying to haunt his former friend and murderer, and wandered along the ley lines again. He was losing track of time and himself when he found himself suddenly back at his childhood home. 

His mother was in the yard, knelt on a foam pad on the border stones of her rose garden. Her hands were covered in dirty gardening gloves and tears streaked down her face, leaving clean skin under the dirt smudges.

“Mom?” he said, but she didn’t hear him. “Mom, I’m here, don’t cry.”

He knelt beside her in the dirt but she stared unseeing through him. 

“I don’t want you to cry,” Noah said, tears coming to his own eyes. 

She wiped her nose on her gardening glove and picked up her pruners again, reaching through Noah to the rose bush he was sitting in. 

These roses had always been his mother’s pride, planted carefully and pruned meticulously. She warned her children away from them when they had been small, and when they grew older she taught them how to care for them. 

Noah had spent summers as a kid seated beside her as she worked, filling the air with chatter and hauling the bucket of trimmings to the compost heap for her afterwards, insisting he could do it on his own. 

Noah reached into the ground again, searching for the energy he was always connected to. He found it and tried again to pull some with him into the world, pushing it into the roses around him. To his surprise, it seemed to work this time, and the plant he sat in began to glow with soft light as several blooms opened slowly. 

His mother gasped and Noah tore his attention from the roses to her face. With wide eyes, she reached out and touched one of the new blooms. 

“Noah?” she asked the air around her softly.

“Yes, Mom, I’m here,” Noah whispered back, covering her hand with his own. “I’m here.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if it's any solace i also cried writing and editing this


	5. Out the Window

Noah often found himself on the Aglionby campus these days. Something about the energy had changed around the place and it called to him. 

Barrington Whelk had returned from university with a teaching certificate and a job offer and at first, Noah thought it was him that had pulled him back to this place he once called home. 

But then he saw him. 

He was sitting in Whelk’s classroom, considering writing something on the chalkboard — he was much better at haunting these days — when he looked out the window and his eyes caught on the boy. 

A quintessential Aglionby student, the boy had nicely coiffed hair, golden tan skin with a sharp jawline and bright smile. He wore his Aglionby sweater and slacks with Sperry Top Siders and laughed easily with a group of other boys. 

It had been six years but he still knew the boy. It was the same one he had once saved on the ley line, all grown up. 

The energy around him pulsed with potential and Noah knew why he was back at Aglionby. 

For once, he was thankful for the fact that he had died in his Aglionby sweater, as he pulled the energy around him to manifest physically as he ran to catch up with the group. 

As he blended into their crowd, he listened for clues of who the boy was. One boy called him “Dick”, another called him “Gansey.” Noah smiled and followed the inane schoolboy chatter he hadn’t known he’d missed. 

When they reached the parking lot, the rest of the boys broke off, leaving only Dick Gansey and the tall boy with the shaved head. They made their way to a vintage orange Camero and Noah hurried to follow. 

“Wait up, guys!” he called, making sure he was rooting his voice in the real world. For a moment, they were confused, but as Noah pushed his energy into them, their brows smoothed and Gansey clapped him on the shoulder. 

“Noah! There you are.”

Noah smiled at them and climbed into the backseat of the car, firmly in their group. The energy to add himself to their lives was exhausting, so he just sat in the back and listened as Gansey talked to the other boy, Ronan he learned, about ley lines and Glendower of all things. 

Noah just smiled and watched the scenery go by. 

When they arrived at their destination, Noah gawked. 

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” 

It was a huge building, some sort of manufacturing plant if Noah had to guess, with tall windows on the top floor. Gansey led the way up a flight of stairs and into the space. It was mostly open with three doors off to one side. 

“I was thinking now that the kitchen is done we should decide how to do the bedrooms,” Gansey was saying, waving his arm as he spoke. 

Ronan yelled “dibs” and ran towards one of the doors. Gansey just laughed and turned to Noah. 

“You want the other room?” he asked. 

Noah frowned. He hadn’t meant to move in with them, but he supposed the ley line energy had decided that for him. 

“I don’t mind having my bed in the main space, I promise.” Gansey smiled winningly. “It will give me more room to spread out anyways.

“Um, sure,” Noah said, opening the middle door and finding an empty room obviously only recently cleaned. How was he going to get furniture to fill it?

“Perfect, it’s decided, then. I’m going to put in the furniture order this evening, anything you need?” 

“Oh, um, just the basics I guess.”

“Great. And you told the headmaster you’re leaving the dorms? Ronan and I did earlier today but we couldn’t find you,” Gansey said.

He had really inserted himself well, hadn’t he? Even if it had mostly been by accident.

“Yes, I did.”

“Perfect. Nino’s for dinner?”

“I’m down,” Ronan interjected, emerging from the other room. “Noah?”

Noah shrugged, he could feel himself fading. He wasn’t sure how much time he had left. “I’ve got some homework, can you drop me back on campus?”

“Sure,” Gansey smiled. “Let’s go.”

As he followed Gansey from the building he caught a glimmer of the energy that had drawn Noah in, maybe the same energy that Noah had put there over six years ago.

He was where he was meant to be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah there's our boys


	6. Nino's at Night

Noah fiddled with his water glass as Gansey poured over the last bit of research he had come across, flipping madly through his journal and explaining it to Ronan, Adam, and himself. 

Sometimes Noah thought he had given Gansey an advantage over Whelk because of the ley line energy, but other times he thought it was just pure enthusiasm that had led to all of his discoveries. 

Sometimes it felt more like fate.

Adam was newer to their group, adopted by Gansey after the Pig broke down on the way to Aglionby on a morning Ronan had driven himself in an angry rage after a night of dreaming and Noah was too tired from Ronan’s dreams straining the ley line. 

Noah didn’t know how Gansey did it, pulled people in with that magnetic energy, but no one was immune to it. Sometimes he thought he probably hadn’t even needed to insert himself the way he did, that Gansey would have adopted him regardless. 

But he was happy how it had turned out. 

Adam was leaning over the table to get a better look at the journal and Gansey was talking too fast for anyone to really follow and Ronan was eating pizza like it had personally wronged him and Noah was happy. 

“Noah, what do you think?” Adam interrupted his thoughts.

“Hmm?” Noah blinked, having not been paying attention. 

“Just Gansey’s newest theory on Glendower,” Ronan snorted.

Noah laughed and leaned into the journal to read with Adam. 

The way Gansey’s eyes lit up when he hunted Glendower was intoxicating. It pulled him in a way that’s Whelk’s enthusiasm for it never had. He wasn’t sure if it was Gansey’s gansey-ness or the way their fates were now intertwined.

He felt guilty sometimes that he had used the ley line energy to insert himself here and had tried to tell Gansey twice, but both times the words had slipped over him and he had just changed the subject. 

They would find out eventually, surely. For now, he was happy to have friends. 

There was something missing from their group, though, or someone, probably. They weren’t making any progress with the search — Noah refused to give them information he couldn’t source, afraid of unraveling their fates somehow — and Noah was more and more sure it was a someone, not a something, these days. 

But he listened attentively as Gansey laid out his latest research and encouraged where he could, patient for their fates to find their way to the missing piece. 

A waitress, not the one who had brought their pizza, came over and asked brusquely if they needed anything and Noah looked up at her. 

Her hair was spiked in all directions and secured with a variety of clips. Noah wanted to touch it. 

After a moment, where Gansey looked around the table and got head shakes all around, Noah pinpointed the urge. Her energy was different than his own pure ley line or Ronan’s dreamer energy or Gansey’s fate energy. It was like she was bouncing it all back at them, amplifying it, mirroring it. 

The waitress left and the other boys teased Adam about his blush but Noah watched the girl go. 

Noah thought if he touched her he would glow. He thought if she touched Gansey he might explode. But he knew one thing for sure.

They would find Glendower this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the gang's all here


	7. Cabeswater stars

Time hadn’t flowed in order for Noah in a while. He thought. It was hard to tell since he existed outside of it now. 

But the moment he was in right now was a bittersweet one, he knew that much. 

His friends didn’t know it yet but he had seen what happened next and he knew what they didn’t: this would be the last time they saw the stars from Cabeswater. 

The stars were beautiful in Henrietta, the sky more clear and the air more crisp than the city air he had grown up on. But the stars in Cabeswater danced. 

They were from Ronan’s mind in a way and Ronan’s mind was never still so the stars were not either, even if they moved slower than him. They sparkled with potential and moved in time in accordance with the wishes of the humans it held close. That Noah held close. 

He and Cabeswater were alike in some ways. They loved the same people, they existed in all times and no time at once, and they shone for the Raven King. 

Soon he would truly be the Raven King. Soon he would die again and Noah would be there again. Noah knew this and Gansey knew this, too. But for tonight, all was peaceful. The king and his magicians. The mirror and the spirit. It was the last time they would be here like this but it was alright. 

“Don’t throw it away,” Noah whispered into the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has been following along with this! And thank you to my fellow mods on Czernsgiving, Aurum and Cashew.   
> This chapter was supposed to be longer but I just made myself really sad and decided it was good there.   
> You can find me on tumblr at blueseyforthesoul or I co-mod a discord server for trc/tdt if you’re a discord person hmu!

**Author's Note:**

> will be posting a chapter each day this week, definitely get the tissues. I'm on tumblr as blueseyforthesoul.


End file.
